Increasing breath holding ability

[jedwardo]

How can I increase the time I can hold my breath, I see people on the web do it for up to 4 minutes. I am lucky to get 45 seconds. I enjoy snorkleing but my dive time is very limited

[Panic Button]

Hyperventilate first

[Ethel]

Good info here:

http://www.bluewaterhunter.com/education/educa tion_lung.html

[jake-the-peg]

I used to teach diving Jed.

Hyperventillation can be very dangerous especially when diving to depths. You can be fine at depth bust as you come back up you get a much reduced partial pressure of oxygen in the last 10 meters.

This is the dead zone where many free divers black out.

There have been a number of deaths in free diving and countless black outs.

There is something called the mamalian dive reflex. It causes your heart rate to slow when your head is submerged in cold water. Some people have it some don't. If you don't you're never going to hold your breath for 4 minutes! ( I think that's pretty rare anyway).

Most important is to relax, minimise motion to just you legs and use a properly adjusted weightbelt so you're not fighting to get down or up

[joggerjayne]

Jake is right about not hyperventilating. As he knows the technical word for it, I suspect that Panic was just being facetious.

Try lying face down on the surface, and train your body increasingly to resist the urge to breathe. It's like any other muscle reflex training. Your body can get used to the feeling that you need to breathe. There is sufficient O2 in the residual air in your lungs for quite a long time after the CO2 starts telling your body to take another breath.

I can do about two minutes.

[jake-the-peg]

I didn't say don't do it, I said it was dangerous.

A little hyperventillation helps flush CO2 from your system and helps but limit it to a few breaths

It's the build up of CO2 that gives you that desperate urge to breathe not a depletion of oxygen - you've actually got quite a lot of O2 left in your body when you find you have to breathe. If you flush too much CO2 you can run out of Oxygen before you have to breathe and that's when you can black out.

There's a big difference between holding your breath in a chair or at the side of a pool holding on with your head submerged (which is where these records are mostly set) and actually snorkelling where you're expending energy and burning O2.

Like JJ I can do between 90 seconds an 2 minutes sitting still but I doubt I'd be much better than your 45 seconds swimming underwater.